SOLACE
Bad news proverbially flies apace, and it is strange how soon the
intelligence of any catastrophe pervades an entire household.
Though it was towards the small hours of morning that the coach arrived,
with its dead freight, at the gates of Hamilton Hill, the whole
establishment seemed to arouse itself on the instant, and to become
aware, as though by instinct, that something had occurred productive of
general confusion and dismay.
Cerise, pale and spiritless, was sitting in her bed-chamber, over the
embers of a dying fire, thinking wearily of her husband, wondering, with
aching heart and eyes full of tears, what could be this shadow that had
of late come up between them, and now threatened to darken her whole life.
How she wished, yes, she actually wished now, she had never married
him. He would have remembered her then as the girl he might have loved.
For his own happiness, she protested, she could give him up readily,
cheerfully even, to another woman. Then she reviewed all the women of
her acquaintance, without, however, being able to fix on one to whom she
could make this sacrifice ungrudgingly. She thought, too, how forlorn
she would feel deprived of George. And yet, was she not deprived of
him already? Could any separation be more complete than theirs? It was
torture to reflect that he could not really have loved her, or it would
never have come to this. And to leave her thus, without an opportunity
for inquiry or explanation. It was careless, unkind, unpardonable.
Better to have been sure of his affection, to have known his last thought
was for her, and to have seen him brought in dead before her very eyes
into the house!
A hurried step was on the stair, a trembling hand flung open the door,
and Lady Hamilton’s maid rushed into the room, pale, scared, and
incoherent, to exclaim—
“Oh! my lady—my lady! Whatever are we to do? The coach has been robbed,
and they’ve brought him back home! They’re carrying him up the front
stairs now. Stone dead, my lady! He never spoke, Ralph says, nor moved
after the shot. Such a home-coming! such a home-coming! Oh dear! oh dear!”
Lady Hamilton’s jaw dropped, and her whole face stiffened, as if she
had been shot herself. Then she wailed out, “He was angry with me when
he went away,” repeating the same words over and over again, as though
attaching no meaning to the sounds, and staggering, with hands extended,
like a blind woman to the staircase, while, numbed and palsied, as it was
by the cruel pain, a silent prayer went out from her heart that she might
die.
A strong form caught her in its arms, and she looked up in her husband’s
face, living, unhurt, and kindly; but saddened with a grave and sorrowing
expression she had never seen there before.
“Cerise,” he whispered, “a great grief has come upon us. There has been a
skirmish on the moor, and Florian, poor Florian, has lost his life.”
She was sobbing in his embrace, sobbing with an intense and fearful joy.
“Thank God!” she gasped, putting her hair back from her white face, and
devouring him with wild, loving eyes. “Darling, they told me it was
_you_—they told me it was _you_.”
Nearer, nearer, he clasped her, and a tear stole down his cheek. It was
_him_, then, all the time she had loved with her whole heart _in spite_
of his being her husband. It was for his departure she had been grieving
in patient silence; it was his displeasure, and no unhallowed fondness
for another, that had lately dimmed the soft blue eyes, and turned the
sweet face so pale.
“My love!” he whispered; but, notwithstanding his past suspicions, his
injustice, his cruel condemnation, this seemed all the amends he was
disposed to make; for he went on to tell her how the coach had been
beset, and how he must himself have been killed, but for Florian’s
self-devotion—Florian, who was now lying dead in the very room that had
lately come to be called his own.
She wanted no explanation, no apology. She had forgiven him long before
he spoke. She had thought him estranged; she had believed him dead; and
now he was alive again, and he was her own.
“I care not! I care not!” she exclaimed, wildly. “Let them live or die;
what is it to me, so that you are safe! Shame on me,” she added, with
more composure, “how selfish I am—how heartless! Let us go to him,
George, and see if nothing can be done.”
Nothing could be done, of course. Hand in hand, husband and wife visited
the chamber of death, hand in hand they left it, with saddened faces
and slow, reverential step. But Sir George never forgot the lesson of
that night; never again doubted the woman who had given him her whole
heart; nor joined in the sneer of those who protest that purity and
self-sacrifice are incompatible with earthly love.
But for the snow, Madame de Montmirail would have left Hamilton Hill next
day. It was delightful, no doubt, to witness the perfect understanding,
the mutual confidence, that had been re-established between Cerise
and her husband; but it was not amusing. “Gratifying, but a little
wearisome,” said the Marquise to herself, while she looked from her
window on the smooth undulating expanse of white that forbade the
prospect of travelling till there should come a thaw. Never perhaps
in her whole life had this lady so much felt the want of excitement,
intrigue, business, dissipation, even danger, to take her out of herself,
as she expressed it, and preserve the blood from stagnating in her veins.
It is only doing her justice also to state that she was somewhat anxious
about Malletort. With half a yard of snow on the ground, however, not to
mention drifts, it was hopeless to speculate on any subject out of doors
till the weather changed.
For Slap-Jack, nevertheless, whose whole life had been passed in conflict
with the elements, even a heavy fall of snow seemed but a trifling
obstacle, easily to be overcome, and on no account to interfere with so
important a ceremony as a seaman’s wedding. Assisted by his shipmate, who
had consented to officiate as “best man” on the occasion, he set to work,
“with a will,” so he expressed it, and cleared away a path four feet
broad from the Hill to the “Hamilton Arms.” Down this path he proceeded
in great state to be married, on the very day the thaw set in, attended
by Sir George and Lady Hamilton, the Marquise, Smoke-Jack, and all the
servants of the establishment. Ere the ceremony was accomplished, the
wind blew high and the rain fell in torrents, omens to which the old
foretopman paid not the slightest attention, but of which his best man
skilfully availed himself to congratulate the bridegroom on his choice.
“It looks dirty to windward,” he proclaimed, in a confidential whisper,
heard by the whole company; “and a chap ain’t got overmuch sea-room when
he’s spliced. But she’s weatherly, mate; that’s what _she_ is—wholesome
and weatherly. I knows the trim on ’em.”
At a later period in the afternoon, however, when I am sorry to say,
he had become more than slightly inebriated, Smoke-Jack was heard to
express an equally flattering opinion as to the qualities, “wholesome
and weatherly,” of Mrs. Dodge, not concealing his intention of making a
return voyage, “in ballast o’ coorse,” as he strongly insisted, to these
latitudes, when he had delivered a cargo in London. Shrewd observers were
of opinion, from these compromising remarks and other trifling incidents
of the day, that it was possible the hostess of the “Hamilton Arms”
might be induced to change her name once more, under the irresistible
temptation of subjugating so consistent a woman-hater as Smoke-Jack.
But in the last century, as in the present, death and marriage trod close
on each other’s heels. The customers at the “Hamilton Arms” had not done
carousing to the health of bride and bridegroom, the wintry day had not
yet closed in with a mild, continuous rain, and Smoke-Jack was in the
middle of an interminable forecastle yarn, when a couple of labouring
men brought in the body of a darkly-clad foreign gentleman, who had
lately been lodging at this roadside hostelry. They had found him half
covered by a waning snow-wreath just under the wall in the “stell,” said
these honest dalesmen, below Borrodaile Rise. He must have been dead for
days, but there was no difficulty in identifying the Abbé, for the frozen
element in which he was wrapped had kept off the very taint of death,
and preserved him, to use their own language, “in uncommon fettle, to be
sure!” Except the Marquise, I doubt if any one regretted him, and yet
it seemed a strange and piteous fate for the gifted scholar, the able
churchman, the polished courtier, thus to perish by breaking his neck off
a Yorkshire mare on a Yorkshire moor.
“Men are so different!” observed Cerise, as she and George discussed the
Abbé’s death, and, indeed, his character, walking together through the
park, after the snow was gone, in the soft air of a mild winter’s day,
nowhere so calm and peaceful as in our English climate.
“And women, too,” replied George, looking fondly in the dear face he
had loved all his life, and thinking that her like could only be found
amongst the angels in heaven.
Cerise shook her head.
“You know nothing about us,” said she. “My own, how blind you must have
been when you went away and left me nothing of your cruel self but a
riding-glove.”
He laughed, no doubt well pleased.
“It was you, then, who had taken it? I looked for it everywhere, and was
forced to go away without it.”
“You did not look _here_,” she answered, and warm from the whitest bosom
in the world she drew the missing glove that had lain there ever since
the night he left her.
“George,” she added, and the love-light in her eyes betrayed her feelings
no less than the low, soft accents of her voice, “you know now that I
prize your little finger more than all the rest of the world. I never saw
another face than yours that I cared twice to look upon, and it is my
happiness, my pride, to think that I was never loved by any man on earth
but _you_!”
She raised her head and looked around in triumph while she spoke. Her
eye, resting on the church of the distant village, caught a gleam of
white from a newly-raised tomb-stone amongst its graves. An old man
wrapping up his tools was in the act of leaving that stone, for he had
finished his task. It was but to cut the following inscription:—
FLORIAN DE ST. CROIX.
✚
R. I. P.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Au petit couvert.
[2] A national banking scheme was about this period proposed to the
Regent of France by a financial speculator of Scottish extraction named
Law.
[3] The progeny of a white and a Quadroon, sometimes called an Octoroon.
[4] A witch.
[5] Evil eye.
[6] Runaway negroes who join in bands and live by plunder in the woods.
UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.